Brontos in the outfield is shagging pop flies. Caught like a tossed grape, the ball’s cupped gently between his molars, snapped back to second base with an agile flip from a flexible pipeline neck. T. Rex on the pitcher’s mound scowls at the score. It’s 2-and-2, man on third.  As he snarls, thunderous noise erupts from the crowd. 

The umpire must be that Stegosaurus, crouching behind the slugger. Or perhaps that’s the catcher, pivoting to slap down a strike with a wide-paddled rack of fins. In the stands, spectators batten their appetites on lizard rolls smothered in swamp onion sauce.

Pacing the sidelines, the team’s designated runner is a Velociraptor, naturally, because they’re wily, wiry, and fast. For this is how imagination works—it rummages in the mind’s toybox, grabbing whatever is closest, flinging stitched-together scraps of Saturday morning cartoons into the Technicolor mitts of fragmented movie scenes, changing a character’s batting order on a whim. When the creative footlocker empties, the dugout does, too.

Inning’s over, the game’s won, and a bee swarm of blue Smurfs clad in elfin uniforms storms across the third-base line onto the field. No longer wary of being tagged out by restraint or inhibition, they jubilantly surround home plate. The Cambrian explosion of joy sends their Jurassic Park opponents trudging to the shower room—heavy-heeled as only a losing team can be, when it’s headed towards last place and the season of oblivion.